Rethinking ‘Woman’: Caste, Gender, and Sexuality in Indian Feminism

Who counts as a “woman” in the Indian feminist movement? At first glance, the question seems almost absurd – but it sits at the heart of one of the most important debates in Indian feminist history. For decades, the mainstream women’s movement in India operated on a simple assumption: all women share the same problems, face the same oppression, and can speak in a single collective voice. Dalit feminists, queer activists, and feminist scholars have dismantled that assumption piece by piece, showing that caste, gender, and sexuality intersect in ways that make the category “woman” far more complex than any single movement can capture.

The problem with a universal “woman” 🔗

The Indian women’s movement that took shape in the 1970s and 1980s was largely driven by educated, upper-caste, middle-class women. These women brought real energy to issues like dowry violence, rape law reform, and gender discrimination – but they also tended to frame all women’s experiences through their own social location. The mainstream feminist movement in India largely represents the privileged upper castes and channels a discourse limited to the rights of upper-caste women, actively refusing to address caste. This silence had consequences. When a movement claims to speak for all women but only addresses the concerns of some, it does not just fail those left out – it actively reproduces their marginalization.

Feminist scholar Nivedita Menon has tracked how, from the 1990s onward, the analytical category of “gender” in India began to be used to challenge the very notion of “woman” as the subject of feminist politics – a challenge that came precisely from the politics of caste and sexuality. In other words, the more closely scholars and activists looked at who was being included or excluded, the harder it became to treat “woman” as a stable, unified identity that feminism could simply take for granted.

The emergence of Dalit feminism 🔗

Dalit feminism is a feminist perspective that questions both caste and gender roles – within mainstream feminism as much as in broader society. It grew out of a clear political reality: by the end of the 1970s, Dalit women began to realize that their realities were not being reflected in the larger women’s movement narrative. They faced not one but two systems of domination simultaneously – Brahmanical patriarchy from outside their communities and patriarchal norms from within.

This dual oppression has a long history. In 1916, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar published a paper called Castes in India that examined how endogamy – the practice of marrying within a caste group – functioned by maintaining control over women’s sexuality and lives, making it the very basis of the caste system. Practices like enforced widowhood, denial of clothing to women from marginalised communities, and child marriage were all expressions of this control. Ambedkar was, in this sense, the first to directly link caste oppression with gender.

Yet the mainstream women’s movement of the post-independence era continued to downplay caste in order to maintain an image of unity among women. Scholars working through an upper-caste bias ignored the gendering of the caste question, and much scholarship on women in modern India focused on the concerns of Savarna women – particularly Brahmin women – reframing their problems as those of Hindus, and therefore of all Indians. The effect was to erase the specific experiences of Dalit women from both feminist and Dalit political spaces at once.

Dalit women speak for themselves 🔗

The push for autonomous Dalit feminist organizing grew steadily from the 1980s onward. The first national meeting of Dalit women took place in Bangalore in 1987. Through the 1990s, several organizations created by Dalit women were formed, including the National Federation of Dalit Women and the All India Dalit Women’s Forum. The movement found its first autonomous expression through the formation of the National Federation of Dalit Women in New Delhi in 1995.

Activists like Ruth Manorama became central voices in this shift. Manorama was the first to articulate a framework of triple discrimination – based on class, caste, and gender – that Dalit women face, leading to a distinct organized space for Dalit women’s movements from the 1990s onward. A famous exchange captures the stakes of this argument: when feminist activist Kamla Bhasin declared “We [all women] are one” at a feminist gathering, Manorama stood up and responded plainly, “No, we are not” – and when challenged that she was dividing the movement, she replied, “We are already divided on the basis of caste.”

Brahmanical patriarchy as a distinct framework 🔗

One of the most significant theoretical contributions of Dalit feminism has been the concept of Brahmanical patriarchy – the idea that the specific form of gender oppression Dalit women experience is not simply “patriarchy” but a system coded in Brahmanical prescriptive texts and structurally integrated into caste hierarchy. Dalit feminism identifies Brahmanical patriarchy as the source of Dalit women’s oppression – one that sets different rules for upper-caste and Dalit women in terms of sexuality, marriage, and labour.

This framework challenges mainstream Indian feminism’s tendency to treat patriarchy as a single, undifferentiated system. Feminist discourse in India has largely been controlled by Savarna women who tend to ignore caste, making it insufficient for addressing the patriarchal oppression of all women – not just those from the upper-caste class. The Dalit movement did not interrogate gender, while the women’s movement did not engage with Brahmanical patriarchy – leading to the invisibility of Dalit women’s experiences in both spaces.

The question of sexuality and the limits of feminist solidarity 🔗

Caste is not the only axis that complicated the category “woman” in Indian feminism. Sexuality did so too – and in ways that created additional tensions within the movement. From the 1990s onward in India, gender as an analytical category began to be used to challenge the notion of “woman” as the subject of feminist politics, with this challenge coming from both the politics of caste and sexuality.

Queer women and lesbian activists found themselves in a difficult position within the broader feminist movement. They shared feminist concerns about gender-based violence and patriarchy, but also faced exclusion based on their sexual orientation – including within feminist spaces dominated by heteronormative assumptions. Groups like LABIA – a Queer Feminist LBT Collective based in Mumbai – were long dedicated to intersectionality, doing queer and feminist activism together. The evolution of the group’s name itself, from “Women to Women” to “Stree Sangam” to its current form, reflects the gradual acknowledgment that gender and sexuality cannot be neatly separated in feminist organizing.

The legal battle around Section 377 – the colonial-era law that criminalized same-sex relations – also intersected with feminist politics in important ways. The Delhi High Court’s 2009 decriminalization of consensual homosexual acts among adults was the first major legal victory for LGBTQ+ rights in India. But this legal progress did not automatically translate into inclusion within feminist spaces. For many queer Dalit women especially, caste and sexuality compounded each other in ways that neither the mainstream feminist movement nor the mainstream queer movement fully addressed.

When solidarity fractures: the bar dancer debate 🔗

A particularly revealing tension emerged at the 2006 National Conference of Autonomous Women’s Groups in Kolkata. At the conference, a conflict arose between newly politicised bar dancers from Mumbai and Dalit feminist groups, who found it impossible to support bar dancing as a profession. For the bar dancers, the feminist principle of women’s right to choose their work applied directly to them. For Dalit feminist activists, the question was more complicated: what does “choice” mean when Dalit women are routinely pushed into sexual labour precisely because of their caste location? This debate exposed the limits of a feminism built on abstract notions of choice without accounting for the structural constraints imposed by caste.

Rethinking intersectionality in the Indian context 🔗

Scholars have debated whether the concept of intersectionality – developed by Black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in the US context – is sufficient for capturing the complexity of Indian women’s experiences. Since Crenshaw’s 1989 article, the concept of intersectionality has been used in India by feminist, anti-caste, disability rights, and queer rights scholars, activists, and organisations. But Nivedita Menon and others have argued that applying intersectionality as a universal framework risks importing a framework rooted in the specific history of race and Black feminism in the US, which does not map cleanly onto the caste system in India.

Menon argues that feminism requires us to recognize that “women” is neither a stable nor a homogeneous category – and that the same is true of caste, race, and class. Rather than stacking identities on top of each other as fixed layers of oppression, she and others suggest we need to understand how these categories are mutually constituted – how being a Dalit woman is not simply “being Dalit” plus “being a woman,” but involves a distinct social location that neither category alone can describe.

Intersectionality challenges the essentialist view of womanhood by recognizing that women’s experiences are shaped not only by gender but also by other social markers – helping to uncover the unique challenges faced by Dalit women, tribal women, LGBTQ+ individuals, and other marginalized groups within feminist discourse. The point, ultimately, is not to fragment the feminist movement into competing identity groups, but to build a more honest and more inclusive understanding of who feminist politics must serve.

What this means for feminist solidarity 🔗

The debates around the category “woman” in Indian feminism are not just theoretical exercises. They have direct implications for how feminist agendas are set, whose voices are centered, and what kinds of alliances are built. Dalit feminism pushes for a more inclusive and intersectional approach to social justice – exposing the interconnections of caste, gender, and other forms of oppression while questioning existing power structures. This means upper-caste feminists must reckon with their own caste privilege, and mainstream queer movements must reckon with the ways caste shapes who can access the benefits of legal reform or public visibility.

Dalit women were careful to express that organizations for Dalit women were not meant to be divisive or separatist, and that there existed a need for continued alliances with Dalit men and non-Dalit women – but also that Dalit women needed to speak for themselves. This dual commitment – to coalition and to autonomous voice – captures the productive tension at the heart of Indian feminist debates. True solidarity cannot be declared from above; it has to be built from an honest reckoning with difference.

The question of who counts as a “woman” for feminist purposes is ultimately a question about whose suffering matters, whose knowledge shapes the agenda, and whose liberation is actually being imagined. Indian feminism’s richest contributions have come precisely from those who refused to accept easy answers.

What do you think? If a feminist movement claims to represent all women but its leadership and agenda are shaped primarily by upper-caste, heterosexual women, can it genuinely be called inclusive – or does inclusion require something more fundamental than just open doors? And how should feminist movements balance the need for broad coalitions with the equally urgent need to center the most marginalized voices within those coalitions?

References

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